In the devil that danced on the Water (2004), a stirring memoir about her family, particularly her dissident father, in Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna writes how she lived in a world of “parallel realities” as a child. When her father, Mohamad Forna, a minister, was arrested — he was later accused of treason and executed — Aminatta was only 10. Nobody bothered to explain what had happened. She grew up in boarding school in the UK, became a journalist and went back to Sierra Leone to unravel the past. Most of all, she wanted to find out the truth. “There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories, there were judgements and then there were facts… their version, my version.”

Two years later, she is reclaiming Sierra Leone again, this time in fiction, her first, doing so without ever mentioning her country by name. “It began with a letter, as stories sometimes do.” Abie, who is married to a Scotsman and lives in the UK with two children, receives a letter from her cousin Alpha, who lives in a country “that seemed to have disappeared,” telling her in two short sentences: “The coffee plantation at Rofathane is yours. It is there.”

As she goes home to her four aunts — each one’s mother a wife of Abie’s rich grandfather — she wants to record their stories. Asana, widow, daughter of Ya Namina, “my grandfather’s senior wife”; Mary, spinster; Serah, divorcee; and Hawa, “whose face wore the same expression I remembered from my childhood — of disappointment already foretold.”

... contd.